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The Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority will apply for a $30 million federal grant that the
agency’s leader said could leverage an additional $100 million to redevelop the Poindexter Village
site and nearby areas on the city’s Near East Side.

CMHA has hired McCormack Baron Salazar, a St. Louis-based for-profit developer to help prepare
the grant application with local partners.

Hiring the company will cost the housing authority $500,000, said Charles Hillman, CMHA’s
president and CEO.

The local partners are Moody-Nolan architects, the Robert Weiler Co., the engineering firm
EMH&T, Jamie Greene of ACP Visioning and Planning, and Danni Palmore of Policyworks LLC,
Hillman said.

McCormack Baron Salazar would co-develop the Poindexter Village site with a mix of market-rate
and low-income housing, said company spokeswoman Cady Seabaugh. CMHA already is embarking on a $15
million effort to build 104 apartments for senior citizens there.

A partnership involving Ohio State University, CMHA and the city plans to redevelop the area —
about 800 acres east of I-71 and north of Broad Street.

The deadline for the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative Grant is Sept. 10. Nine such grants have
been awarded over two rounds during the past three years, Seabaugh said, adding that there have
been more than 40 applications in each of the rounds.

Hillman said redevelopment efforts would continue in the neighborhood even if Columbus doesn’t
receive the grant. “We’re not turning away anything,” he said.

Meanwhile, as redevelopment in East Franklinton continues to materialize through plans for a new
Veterans Memorial and Columbus Zoo and Aquarium attraction, CMHA is preparing to ask companies for
proposals to redevelop the 13-acre former Riverside-Bradley site. That Franklinton apartment
complex was plagued by crime, drugs and violence until it was razed in 2011.

It was one of six CMHA properties demolished or sold in a five-year plan to rid the agency of
complexes deemed too expensive to renovate and keep.

CMHA has embarked on other similar projects. It stepped in to take over the stalled Whitney
apartment project in the King-Lincoln district to the tune of $3.5 million. And it is completing
the $13 million, 100-unit Franklin Station senior-housing complex on W. Broad Street in
Franklinton.

Tom Leach, the field-office director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in
Columbus, said more-progressive agencies are taking the role of developer.

“CMHA is probably the largest landlord in the county,” Leach said. “They take the role very
seriously to building up neighborhoods.”

And officials there will continue to play a role, said Steve Schoeny, Columbus’ development
director. “You can’t have someone who owns that much land to not be thinking holistically,” he
said.

The city’s East Franklinton plan calls for housing and other uses on the Riverside-Bradley site
in the next 10 years. The new developments proposed for there should generate interest in the site,
said Jim Sweeney, executive director of the nonprofit Franklinton Development Association.